Retention is the new whatever
January Report
Two big reports dropped in the last couple of months that I have been meaning to getting around to talk about.
Indvandrere i Danmark 2025 by Danmarks Statistik1
The NINETEENTH annual edition of the roundup of stats about immigrants and their offspring in terms of employment, education, demographics, distribution.
It’s of course gratifying to find out the things I have been writing about all year are confirmed by the experts. It’s also frustrating.
One fact nugget
the highest paid female immigrants earn more (447k DKK) than the average female local (408k DKK) but less than the average male local (529k DKK)
DI Analysis on Immigrant Retention (2025)
Strengths:
Comprehensive dataset covering 2009-2023 immigration cohorts with longitudinal tracking
Clear segmentation by residence permit type (work, study, family reunification, asylum)
Identifies convergence trend between highly educated and low-skilled worker retention rates
Transparent methodology section explaining cohort analysis approach
Useful breakdown by job function (DISCO categories) for work permit holders
Weaknesses:
Purely descriptive analysis with minimal investigation of causal factors
No examination of marital status/family composition despite having family reunification data showing 90% retention vs 40-50% for work permits
Fails to analyse partner employment impact on retention (Copenhagen Kommune found 61% retention when partner employed vs 49% when not - a 12pp difference)
No policy analysis connecting immigration rules (e.g., permanent residency requirements, researcher tax scheme duration) to emigration patterns
Conflates family reunification with asylum in discussion despite different underlying dynamics
Ignores that family reunification visa holders often enter workforce, creating analytical blind spot
No comparison with other Nordic/EU countries to contextualise Denmark’s performance
Same analysis repeated for ~17 years without actionable recommendations or deeper investigation
No examination of why the highly educated/low-skilled gap is closing (both groups leaving faster, not convergence through improved retention)
Bottom line: Solid data presentation but lacks depth needed to inform evidence-based policy responses to retention crisis.
Where are the policy analysis reports? Am I going to have to write them myself because all I seem to be able to find are annual descriptions of a worsening situation.
Ok, that’s enough despair. We made it, it’s the end of January! We did it. Here is a palette cleanser, here are some of the tools I made last year on streamlit.
Click on the image to go play with the tool.
Journey Analysis
I took CopCaps Expat Survey 2025 and went to town on one particular question they asked: why did you move here? and compared to outcomes.
International Schools
This tool shows that international schools are basically placed at random around the country, it’s not about where the international families are, it’s where the employers want them to be.
Initiatives Map
Not that I am the human version of biting on tinfoil or anything, but CopCap’s Expat Report called for initiatives to be setup around the country to retain international workers and I thought to myself “what like all the initiatives that already exist??” so I vibe coded this baby before lunch. This is also, I must point out, not the full list of initiatives that already exist.
This isn’t shade on the initiatives themselves and it is certainly not shade on CopCap who at least are asking the right questions. My point is subtle so I will try to make it as explicitly and lovingly as I can:-
Maybe it’s the fact that incredibly talented, experienced and qualified partners can’t get jobs and if you get laid off you have to leave the country within 6 months and you can’t do survival jobs while you jobseek. Maybe those factors are more important since initiatives keep going up and retention keeps going down?
Retention
Again, trying to point out that you can recruit as much as you want, it’s an outrageous waste of money and time if you don’t retain who you attracted.
I am looking for more data clients, by the way. If you want me to dig into your data and find out something useful, hit me up and we can have a free data chat to figure out a plan.
I can do policy stuff like the above post, I have also made dashboards and reports for an industrial machine prototype and figured out a pricing strategy for a new video game title.
If you have some data and some questions, I can help you answer them.
Not to start a fight but isn’t it funny that foreigners are discussing which words to use about themselves (expat, international, foreigner, immigrant, etc) where the Danish state is not worried about those nuances at all. We’re ‘immigrants’. Boom. Job done.
The problem is renention is not the goal. The goal is to get people to Denmark and work when they are needed and get rid of them when they're no longer needed. In the current political climate immigrants are once again a hot topic. The other day I modelled the net migration data, which conveniently is not directly reported anywhere, and figured that the average number of net migration per year is really small in Denmark. I will post about it on LinkedIn sometime soon.